http://www.alternet.org/robert-reich-01-percent-blow-their-fortunes-yachts-personal-jets-and-americas-politicians
But they need more money?
The richest Americans hold more of the nation's wealth than they have
in almost a century. What do they spend it on? As you might expect,
personal jets, giant yachts, works of art, and luxury penthouses
And also on politics. In fact, their political spending has been
growing faster than their spending on anything else. It's been growing
even faster than their wealth.
According to new research by
Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Gabriel
Zucman of the London School of Economics, the richest one-hundredth of
one percent of Americans now hold over 11 percent of the nation's total
wealth. That's a higher share than the top .01 percent held in 1929,
before the Great Crash.
We're talking about 16,000 people, each worth at least $110 million.
One way to get your mind around this is to compare their wealth to that
of the average family. In 1978, the typical wealth holder in the top .01
percent was 220 times richer than the average American. By 2012, he or
she was 1,120 times richer.
Because this explosion of wealth at the top has been accompanied by an
erosion of the wealth of the middle class and the poor. In the
mid-1980s, the bottom 90 percent of Americans together held 36 percent
of the nation's wealth. Now, they hold less than 23 percent.
The richest .01 percent haven't been donating out of the goodness of
their hearts. They've donated out of goodness to their wallets.
Their political investments have paid off in the form of lower taxes
on themselves and their businesses, subsidies for their corporations,
government bailouts, federal prosecutions that end in settlements where
companies don't affirm or deny the facts and where executives don't go
to jail, watered-down regulations, and non-enforcement of antitrust
laws.
No comments:
Post a Comment